quotations about literature
Literature, properly so called, draws its sap from the deep soil of human nature's common and everlasting sympathies, the gathered leaf-mound of countless generations, and not from any top dressing capriciously scattered over the surface.
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
Literary Essays
Excessive literary production is a social offense.
GEORGE ELIOT
letter to Alex Main, Sep. 11, 1871
I would be wonderful with a 100-year moratorium on literature talk, if you shut down all literature departments, close the book reviews, ban the critics. The readers should be alone with the books, and if anyone dared to say anything about them, they would be shot or imprisoned right on the spot. Yes, shot. A 100-year moratorium on insufferable literary talk. You should let people fight with the books on their own and rediscover what they are and what they are not. Anything other than this talk.
PHILIP ROTH
The Guardian, Dec. 13, 2005
If I could start over today, I would choose literature again. If the answers exist in the world or in the universe, I still think that's where we're going to find them.
ELIF BATUMAN
The Possessed
Everybody is wearing a mask. It's in literature that true life can be found. It's under the mask of fiction that you can tell the truth.
GAO XINGJIAN
The Guardian, Aug. 1, 2008
Literature has now become a game, in which the booksellers are the kings; the critics the knaves; the public the pack; and the poor author the mere table, or thing played upon.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon
I expected more from literature than from real, naked life.
GUNTER GRASS
The Tin Drum
People who love literature have at least part of their minds immune from indoctrination. If you read, you can learn to think for yourself.
DORIS LESSING
attributed, Grammar Girl's 101 Words Every High School Graduate Needs to Know
Fiction allows us to slide into these other heads, these other places, and look out through other eyes. And then in the tale we stop before we die, or we die vicariously and unharmed, and in the world beyond the tale we turn the page or close the book, and we resume our lives.
NEIL GAIMAN
American Gods
[Literature is] a process of producing grand, beautiful, well-ordered lies that tell more truth than any assemblage of facts.
JULIAN BARNES
The Paris Review, winter 2000
We never reflect whether the story we read be truth or fiction. If the painting be lively, and a tolerable picture of nature, we are thrown into a reverie, from which if we awaken it is the fault of the writer. I appeal to every reader of feeling and sentiment whether the fictitious murder of Duncan by Macbeth in Shakespeare does not excite in him as great a horror of villainy as the real one of Henry IV by Ravaillac as related by Davila? And whether the fidelity of Nelson and generosity of Blandford in Marmontel do not dilate his breast and elevate his sentiments as much as any similar incident which real history can furnish? Does he not, in fact, feel himself a better man while reading them, and privately covenant to copy the fair example?
THOMAS JEFFERSON
letter to Robert Skipwith, Aug. 3, 1771
Let your literary compositions be kept from the public eye for nine years at least.
HORACE
attributed, Day's Collacon
It is fortunate that Literature is in no ways injured by the follies of Collectors, since though they preserve the worthless, they necessarily defend the good.
ISAAC DISRAELI
Curiosities of Literature
I hate brandy ... it stinks of modern literature.
HAROLD PINTER
Betrayal
The world must be all f***ed up when men travel first class and literature goes as freight.
GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZ
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Men of letters are a perpetual Priesthood, from age to age, teaching all men that a God is still present in their life; that all "appearance," whatsoever we see in the world, is but as a vesture for the "divine idea of the world," for "that which lies at the bottom of appearance." In the true literary man there is thus ever, acknowledged or not by the world, a sacredness; he is the light of the world; the world's priest -- guiding it, like a sacred pillar of fire, in its dark pilgrimage through the waste of time.
THOMAS CARLYLE
Heroes: Hero Worship and the Heroic in History
For the creation of a masterwork of literature two powers must concur, the power of the man and the power of the moment, and the man is not enough without the moment.
MATTHEW ARNOLD
The Functions of Criticism at the Present Time
A piece of literature can be many things but first of all it must capture its audience. You need to seduce people, entice them into a world of beauty and horror, light and shadow, of passion, of romance, of mystery. That's the magic of it. Beyond that, of course, you can open a dialogue about the ideas which interest you, but first of all you absolutely must get inside people's minds.
CARLOS RUIZ ZAFON
"Carlos Ruiz Zafon's love letter to literature", New Zealand Listener, Mar. 14, 2013
Literature is an act which gives meaning to experience.
ANNA BALAKIAN
The Symbolist Movement in the Literature of European Languages
To subvert is not the aim of literature, its value lies in discovering and revealing what is rarely known, little known, thought to be known but in fact not very well known of the truth of the human world. It would seem that truth is the unassailable and most basic quality of literature.
GAO XINGJIAN
Nobel Lecture, 2000